Politics & Power Quote by Jose Ramos-Horta

A line like this is the political equivalent of showing your work: Jose Ramos-Horta is performing legitimacy in real time. The sentence is built to reassure two audiences at once - citizens wary of executive overreach and outside donors/investors wary of fiscal chaos. The key move is procedural: “only following approval by the parliament.” That “only” isn’t a technicality; it’s a boundary marker. In young or fragile democracies, the fight is often less about whether money should be spent than about who gets to touch it without scrutiny. Ramos-Horta is signaling that the state’s checkbook has a lock, and the legislature holds a key.

The phrase “these funds” also does quiet work. It implies a pool of money that might be politically sensitive - sovereign wealth revenues, donor funds, or reserves - where the fear is misallocation, patronage, or raiding in a crisis. By framing access as conditional, he’s trying to convert suspicion into confidence: yes, the government can spend, but it must be seen asking permission.

Then comes the comforting shopping list: “infrastructure development, education, public health, and so on.” It’s aspirational, almost donor-report language, designed to sound like nation-building rather than politics. “And so on” is the tell - a deliberate vagueness that keeps the coalition broad and the discretion intact. The subtext: we need flexibility to govern, but we need the optics of restraint to keep trust, stability, and financing in place.